You must stop worrying about why things happen and wonder what they mean when they do.

Nothing the writer can do is ever enough.

But who knows what good might come from the least of us? From the bones of old horses is made the most beautiful Prussian Blue.

The story knows itself better than the writer does at some point, knows what's being said before the writer figures out how to say it.

You must stop worrying about why things happen and wonder what they mean when they do.

What a story is, is devious. It pretends transparency, forthrightness. It engages with ordinary people, ordinary matters, recognizable stuff. But this is all a masquerade. What good stories deal with is the horror and incomprehensibility of time, the dark encroachment of old catastrophes...

You don't believe in Nature anymore. It's too isolated from you. You've abstracted it. It's so messy and damaged and sad. Your eyes glaze as you travel life's highway past all the crushed animals and the Big Gulp cups.